Clare Short, UK Secretary of State for International Development, orchestrated a debt relief scam in the 1990s that left Japan the victim once again. While Britain contributed nothing, Japan forgave six trillion yen in loans and abolished tied aid, under pressure from NGOs, the Catholic Church, and the Asahi Shimbun. Meanwhile, Britain reaped the benefits and China expanded its dominance, funded ironically by Japan’s own money. This article exposes how Japan’s misguided policies enabled both British hypocrisy and Chinese prosperity.
 

This is from Masayuki Takayama’s serialized column in Shukan Shincho, published today, which concludes the issue.
A close friend of mine, a devoted reader, once described our relationship as complementary—and this piece proves that assessment exactly right.
With his unmatched skill as a journalist—the only one of his kind in the postwar world—Takayama vindicates what I myself have been asserting: in recent days I have confronted the UN, COP25, and Greta Thunberg with pollution maps of PM2.5, and Takayama’s analysis proves me correct.
Not only the Japanese people but readers worldwide will marvel at him.

Not Idiots
China’s air is filthy—thick with soot, exhaust fumes, and the dreaded PM2.5.
But what is impressive about the Chinese is that they wondered: could all this dirt somehow be turned into money?
So, China teamed up with a Canadian conman, Maurice Strong, as Watanabe Sōki wrote in the Sankei Shimbun.
They spread the theory that recent warm winters and climate change were caused by “excessive CO₂ concentrations.”
The blame, they said, lay with advanced industrial nations like Japan that had emitted CO₂ for decades.
Therefore, those nations must reduce emissions—or, if they could not, purchase CO₂ emission rights from “developing countries.”

China, at that time the biggest emitter, was exempt—because it was still classified as “developing.”
Strong, backed by Beijing, became chair of the Rio Earth Summit and spread his scam worldwide under the UN’s name, with Chinese NGOs as his foot soldiers.
Japan, ever weak in the face of the UN, fell for it and paid China 100 billion yen annually in the name of emission rights.

In time, Strong’s true nature was exposed. Biologists warned that if CO₂ were reduced much further, plants—dependent on it as a nutrient—would wither.
With the scheme faltering, China pushed forward a new figurehead: the climate-change girl, Greta Thunberg. How effective has she been?

Clare Short’s Deception
Another international fraud of the same 1990s era followed.
The scammer was Clare Short, UK Secretary of State for International Development.
And once again, the victim was Japan.

The setting was sub-Saharan Africa, then ravaged by HIV.
Patients flocked to their former colonial rulers—Britain, France—seeking medical care, and the socialized healthcare systems there were collapsing under the burden.
These countries wanted to drive HIV refugees out, but doing so openly would make them look inhumane.

Clare devised a plan:
What if developed nations canceled the debts owed by sub-Saharan countries? Then, instead of repaying, these poor nations could use the funds to build hospitals locally. That way, they would not need to come to Britain.
A beautiful idea—but Britain’s actual aid contributions were zero.
The largest donor was Japan, which had provided a trillion dollars.

If debts were to be canceled, Britain ought to have bowed to Japan in thanks. Instead, Clare Short attacked, calling Japan’s assistance “tied aid,” painting it as a merciless dinosaur exploiting the poorest countries.
For Japan’s honor, it must be said that the so-called “tied” portion—restricted to specialized fields like medical equipment—amounted to only about 10% of total aid.
It was a baseless slander.

But the smear was amplified by the British-backed NGO Jubilee 2000.
In Japan, the Tokyo Catholic Church and the Asahi Shimbun spread Clare’s lie with slogans like “Stand with the weak.”

In the end, Japan abandoned repayment of official aid loans totaling six trillion yen coming due between 2003 and 2013, and simultaneously abolished tied aid altogether.
Meanwhile, Britain built hospitals in Africa with the debt Japan had forgiven, playing the role of benevolent former colonial ruler, and thereby stemmed the refugee flow.

Japan’s Own “Champion of the Weak”
Speaking of “standing with the weak,” Japan has its own: Shinjiro Koizumi.
Upon becoming environment minister, he rushed to Fukushima fishermen and, in a show of sympathy, promised, “We will not release tritium, even if it is harmless.”
Those fishermen, after all, receive fishing rights for free; buying them out was possible, but Koizumi could never risk offending anyone.

At COP25, Japan was insulted with the “Fossil of the Day” award by climate NGOs. Why did Koizumi not protest that China, the employer of those NGOs, was the real culprit?

Useless in everything, Koizumi recently made noise over Japan’s aid for a coal-fired power plant in Vietnam, declaring piously that exporting CO₂-emitting power stations was unacceptable.
Yet he naively asked, “Why is it that China wins all the contracts?”

The answer is simple: after Japan abolished tied aid, nearly 1 trillion yen in ODA annually has been won almost entirely by China.
Japan has poured trillions in ODA into China, purchased its CO₂ credits, and even funded projects abroad carried out by Chinese.
China’s prosperity has been built on Japan’s foolishness.

Enough is enough.
If Japan restores tied aid and revives nuclear power, which emits no CO₂, then no one will dare call us fools again.